After years of toil and fun, I've sold the trawler and bought a beautiful ketch - Arctic Rose

This blog is about the progress I made with Lady Jane and the start of a completely different lifestyle with Arctic Rose, and other fun stuff.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

An interesting visitor

Working on Lady Jane is, surprisingly, often quite a sociable occasion, with friends over to help and occasional, welcome, visits from the likes of Paula, who comes down to survey at the yard.

The small marina across the way from me is also the source of a steady flow of shouted questions, comments and, occasionally, advice from the various boat owners and visitors there.

Just recently Paul, who you can see here in the picture, shouted across some comment about the progress I'm making with the painting. Apparently he had worked on a trawler in the North Sea and Iceland.

With the opportunity to meet someone who had actually been there and done it, I immediately invited him, and his friend Pat, on board for a look around.

As it turned out, Paul had worked on a very similar trawler out of Lowestoft, England. I found it amazing to hear him describe how the various bits of machinery, now mostly removed of course, were used. Obviously, even though Lady Jane (Z431 Judith) was from Belgium, the methods used when trawling are almost exactly the same.

Meeting Paul, I immediately get the impression he is someone who has been a lot of places, and done a lot of stuff. In the short time he was on board, reminiscing, he had plenty of interesting stories to relate.

In the picture Paul is describing how, as trawlermen, they would get soaked when retrieving the nets from over the side, as the trawlers would be quite low in the water and beam on to the waves.